Apple news blog

As information on the iPad continues to spill out from Apple in the wake of the launch of pre-orders in the U.S., more screenshots and feature information on iWork applications for the iPad have surfaced on Apple’s site. Announced alongside the iPad…

iBooks Application in Landscape Orientation
Apple has augmented its iPad “Features” section with a new page devoted to its iBooks application. Initially available only in the U.S., the iBooks application will be available in the App S…

Bohemian Coding today releases Fontcase 1.5, a free update to the Apple Design Award-winning font manager that is like an iPhoto for your fonts. A few feature-highlights include versatile metadata support, the ability to share fonts on your local network and fantastic ways to preview all your fonts. Version 1.5 adds much-requested auto-activation, duplicates detection, speed increase and stability among other things.

Rocking Pocket Games today announces the availability of Puppet Jump 3D 1.2, a game that can be only described as a cross between Little Big Planet and Doodle Jump for the iPhone. Puppet Jump 3D challenges players to jump on platforms as high as they can without falling, while collecting Puppet Points that can be used to customize your character and unlock new background scenes.

UK based Pure Square Go today announces Chromixa 1.1.1, and update to their critical hit puzzle game for iPhone and iPod touch. Like a jigsaw of light, your goal is to arrange the shapes to fill an outline with a single color. Arrange colored shapes of light to complete beautifully designed puzzles. Primary colors of red, green and blue are rotated, positioned and overlaid to create new tones as shapes overlap.

Sometimes I visit a website on my iPod Touch that is almost unreadable due to the expected size of a screen on a desktop computer. Even when zoomed in, some sites have the text continue off screen, meaning I’d have to scroll left and right to read a whole line of text.

I have MobileMe and sync my bookmarks between computers and my iPod Touch. And one day I happened across just such a too-small site. Frustrated, I decided to just try my Readability bookmarklet, and was happy to see it worked!

You’ll need either an iPhone or iPod Touch and a computer that you sync your device to via USB or MobileMe. From a computer, navigate to Readability and set your desired options. I like Inverse, Extra Large text, and Extra Narrow margins, but pick what you like. Drag your bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, as the site instructs. (You can move it to your Bookmarks menu, anywhere, or into the sidebar of Safari’s Bookmark …

Sometimes, like today, I’m particularly interested in the Apple Store’s status…as in, when is it back up so that I can order whatever it is I’m waiting to order. While sitting around pressing Command-R this morning, I figured there must be a better way. After a few minutes with curl and GeekTool, I had the solution.

Because I didn’t have very much time to implement this trick this morning, I just created a new ‘Shell’ Geeklet in GeekTool, with the refresh set to every five seconds, that showed the output of this command:

curl -s http://store.apple.com/us | grep backsoon | grep australia

Note that the above is specific both to the US Apple Store, and to the current version of that store. You may have to modify it for other geographies, or for future store site changes. Basically, what the command does is grab the Apple Store page via curl, suppresses the normal output (-s...